At McCarter Theater

A couple of weeks after my lecture before the Forum, it happened that
at a concert at McCarter Theater in Princeton we met Einstein. It may
be that he made up his mind to show a little of his change of heart in
order to erase the impression of rejection he had left with me over a
year earlier. During the intermission he stood up, greeted us from his
seat a short distance away, and asked me to sit and chat with him. I took
a temporarily vacant seat in the row in front of him, turning my head
to hear him speak. There was something very unusual in this man. I am
not a hero-worshipper, more nearly an iconoclast: great names do not startle
me, nor do they make me feel humble. But in Einstein I felt this time
something I had not felt on meeting him in Berlin, when he was a jolly
man in his early forties who had achieved singular and spectacular success
which was still new to him, and I was still in my twenties; nor when I
spent time with him again in New York in the spring of 1940, nor when
I visited him in the summer of 1946.

In 1921 he was a young-looking man with well-filled cheeks, warm and
sparkling eyes, a forehead framed by dark and wavy hair, and a moustache
over soft lips, with a ready laughalmost the likeness of a bon-vivant.
Epstein, who portrayed him several years later as flimsy, furrowed, and
wiry, did not succeed at all. Now, thirty years later, at the age of seventy-four,
the change in his appearance was very great. He had grown old, yet stood
erect, with his grey-white hair, now long, falling on his collar. He had
a kind face, and a clear and sonorous voice. Sufferings and private losses
and human destiny had cleansed him and spiritualized him. He looked at
me with kindness, and warmly pressed my hand with his own fleshy hand.
The mattness of his face lighted up.

I reminded him of the Scripta on which we had worked together
in Berlin. This made him wonder aloud on the mystery of time. Is time
a stream flowing always in one direction from the present to the past?
Do the present, future and the past all exist simultaneously? He wondered
and asked me. Yet he brought counterargument to his own thought: but we
cannot remember things that are in the future. This did not appear to
me a valid argument, but I did not say so. Instead, I referred to Platos
discourse on simultaneous existence of the past and the future. The field
of parapsychology deals with such problems. Yes, once I wrote and published
something on the subject, and Freud commented in a letter. Einstein asked
me whether I still had Freuds letters, and whether he could read
one. I promised to select a letter for him to read. And we continued so,
already old friends, when the bell called the audience into the hall.
I returned to my seat.

I sent Einstein the letter of Freud that he wished to see. In that particular
letter Freud wrote me, as usual by longhand, that he had similar, almost
identical ideas, and that he would subscribe to the preface to my work
written by Eugen Bleuler.

A single week passed. There was again a concert at McCarter Theater:
Einstein hardly showed himself twice a year in public, but this time he
came again. Again, during the intermissionhe sat across the aislehe
asked me to take the vacant seat next to him. Some of the Princeton graduate
students sat in the row in front of my wife, and she could hear them wondering
at this fellowship: Einstein when in public was of course the center of
attention, though the public tried to make this not too obvious. Einstein
spoke of religion, and mentioned Spinoza, a spirit toward whom he probably
felt affinity. Like himself, Spinoza was a lonely man; like himself he
was not concerned with material goods; like himself he was in conflict
with men, though he was kind and humane; and like himself he was deeply
religious, though not in the church or synagogue, and it is no wonder,
if one considers the great sufferings to which his mentor Uriel Acosta
was subjectedone of the saddest chapters in the long story of the
Jewish people. But Spinoza was an Aristotelian, without wishing to be
so; the cold reason which insists on explaining away anything unusual
or singular separated Aristotle from his teacher Plato, who tended to
the esoteric, the wonderful, and the singular.

Not long thereafter my wife and I received an invitation to have tea
with Einstein. The day before our visit I found in the mail a letter in
which the writer, a resident of Seaford in England, wrote:

The authorities will object to your subversion of their
life-work, but it is from their minor followers that the bitterest opposition
will come. Those who exercise authority are not so shocked by rebellion
as their underlings. They are doubly offended, for you threaten their
security and insult their judgement. . . . The one Roman Catholic I
would expect to sympathize with my doubts on infallibility would be
His Holiness. It is the hedge-priest and Sunday School teacher who would
cry Blasphemy!